by Will Gold
It is spring 1912, the height of the “Belle Epoque”. Lucien Davide has been roaming the world as a reporter for the Paris daily Le Temps covering France’s latest war of conquest in Morocco where he barely manages to escape from the bloody siege of Marrakesh by Berber tribesmen. From there, he is dispatched to the Balkans where the Ottoman Empire is beginning to break apart and his lover, Miriam, yearns for freedom from her family in tradition-bound Salonika. Lucien’s next stop is home to Paris for the largest peace conference ever held that is struggling to halt the growing momentum toward war between the great powers.
Its most prominent leader is peace crusader Nicholas Fromont. As he is delivering his opening address, he is gunned down by shots from high in the rafters. Lucien holds Nicholas as he is dying. He is aided by Lila Karlakova, a refuge from Russia and ex-lover of Lenin, who is now himself also living in exile in Paris. In her new life in Montmartre, Lila has already found herself in the middle of heated late-night arguments about art and revolution between Picasso, Lenin, and F. T. Marinetti, the bombastic leader of the “Futurists.”
Sir Simon Mallory, one of Nicholas’ most important allies in the peace movement, is there when Nicholas is slain as well. Their question quickly becomes, “Who killed Nicholas Fromont, thus bringing Europe even closer to war?” The Contessa de Gregorio, Nicholas’ hot-blooded mistress from Venice, tells Lucien the key to figuring out who killed Nicholas and why is to retrace the path of Nicholas’ own life. Lucien’s wending journey with Lila into Fromont’s past takes him first to the remote “alternative” community of Ascona in Switzerland and its fabled “Mountain of Truth”, and then on to the discretely tucked-away “Secret Library” in Venice.
Simultaneously, Simon Mallory is struggling to deter his close friend Winston Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty, from launching a surprise first-strike naval attack against Germany. Churchill is a hard-nosed traditionalist and imperialist, but Mallory and his own circle are eager to initiate new, more ground-breaking directions England can take in the years ahead. Edwardian Britain is already being wracked by enormous changes and demands for many more.
From Venice, Lucien’s hunt for Nicholas’ killers leads him to a magnificent estate on the Tegernsee outside Munich, unexplained imprisonment in a dungeon in Vienna, a Teutonic revival ceremony in a castle in Austria, a Freemasonry Lodge in Potsdam, and the massive, smoking factories of the Krupp empire in Essen where a medieval tournament is being held to honor the visiting Kaiser. Lila, meanwhile, risks returning to Saint Petersburg to accompany her brother, who has become an enemy of both the Czar’s secret police and the Bolsheviks, in his harrowing escape from Russia. In Berlin, they are aided by Prussian diplomat and blue-blood Ilse Von Braun who is now struggling as well to turn Germany away from war…
(To be published 2021)